Managing Hospital Rankings

What Marketing Leaders Need to Know

Gelb Consulting, An Endeavor Management Company

2700 Post Oak Blvd. P + 800.846.4051

Suite 1400 F + 281.759.3607

Houston, Texas 77056 www.endeavormgmt.com/healthcare

Managing Hospital Rankings

What Marketing Leaders Need to Know

© 2014 Gelb Consulting. All Rights Reserved. Page 2

Overview With the latest series of rankings being released, marketers continue to face increased pressure to maximize the value of such and, quite often, to affect future results. Across the continuum of ranking systems, including often cited US News and World Report, marketers have very little control of the actual scores. However, this doesn’t excuse marketers from not embracing the challenge to affect change within their organizations. Rankings systems typically include numerical orders based on reputation and quality outcomes, but also patient preference scores. In sum or in part, all of these systems employ some part of market feedback. Fundamentally this is beneficial because it’s important to know the market’s view of your brand. However, it’s all too often the case that executives (usually outside of marketing) hold such rankings as the epitome of employee pride, and, worst case, put them into strategic objectives for marketing to affect. Regardless of the methodologies employed, they all have flaws by the nature of normalizing data, especially amongst those who serve the highest levels of need (i.e., academic medical centers). This paper is intended to arm the marketing executive with a perspective on how to review common rankings systems to develop appropriate plans with senior executives. We have organized this into sections regarding the strategic issues on rankings, provided a cheat sheet regarding some popular ranking systems, and a checklist. This, our latest white paper on the subject of reputation building, is not going to dissect the actual methodologies. While we’ve performed this type of work for select clients, not only is our analysis proprietary, but so are the methodologies employed by the national organizations which promote their rankings.

Managing Hospital Rankings

What Marketing Leaders Need to Know

© 2014 Gelb Consulting. All Rights Reserved. Page 3

Market Impact The fundamental question to address is the extent to which these ratings actually drive brand awareness and demand generation. Based on years of consumer and physician research, we have generally found that higher ratings only benefit those without the current strong perceptions of having clinical or service excellence. In other words, there is little impact on decision-making when consumers are searching for the most advanced and/or appropriate care, because your brand already carries that burden. However, for hospitals that are market challengers, a significant rank jump or change could increase the overall perception of clinical excellence, as awarded by a third-party source. In addition, being associated with a higher-rated organization likely builds a level of self-fulfillment for many types of employees. It stands to reason that team members want to be associated with the best. Nevertheless, it remains to be seen what the difference in a rank might mean between recruiting the top candidates, especially given other factors such as location, career advancement opportunities and culture.

Methodology Matters Start by understanding how these scores are calculated. For example, US News and World Report uses a combination of quality and reputation scores to compile its scores. The only component of this ranking system that marketing can directly affect is the reputation score. It’s important to note that for every specialty, the sample size (i.e., the target market) is so small and diffuse that the investment required to influence these “needles in a haystack” are not advisable due to geographic differences and the strong need for demonstrated clinical quality, point in time awareness, and access to the audience. In other ratings systems (e.g., Consumer Reports), patient/consumer feedback is most important. To a great extent, this depends on the facility’s customer experience to be so outstanding that even those who do not have direct experience go out of their way to recommend it to others. We call this enchantment, which applies to employees, patients and their physicians. In both cases, managing the customer (patients/physician) experience to the point of enchantment is something marketing can influence internally. Many marketing executives are now using a platform for patient experience management to further their efforts to identify service line improvements (before such is promoted externally) by capturing authentic testimonials, and building more robust connectivity to consumer communities via social media.

Managing Hospital Rankings

What Marketing Leaders Need to Know

© 2014 Gelb Consulting. All Rights Reserved. Page 4

We recommend a balanced approach that includes the aforementioned but also ensuring that current patient satisfaction systems are allowing the organization a rapid response to issues at every touchpoint. This includes your contact centers, events, and even publications. In addition, monitoring your brand on a frequent basis to integrate measure awareness, satisfaction, reputation and decision factors is key. Ensure that you’re comparing your brand to others competing for the same types of customers (patients, employees, community/referring physicians). It’s more common that you’re not directly competing for national referrals, but those at a regional level. Equally important is sharing these types of results with your executive team. Most are not conversant in the principles of brand management, thus it’s your responsibility to educate them in this respect. Share results, progress and your plans for building higher levels of brand equity.

Monitoring Sentiment Savvy healthcare marketers have a sense for how various audiences view and discuss your brand. They understand the language, context and timing for conversations taking place in managed and unmanaged venues. Armed with today’s sophisticated tools in conversation monitoring, every organization has access to a variety of tools such as Radian 6, Hoot Suite, Cision and Meltwater. But, monitoring also requires responding to the challenges. For successful monitoring, your organization must have the infrastructure in place to respond to issues that may arise and ultimately affect your brand. Your responses to sentiment and feedback will ultimately impact market perceptions. In addition to real-time service recovery, your marketing programs should adapt to competitive voices and attitudinal changes in the market. Demonstrating that your marketing department is both strategically planning and can tactically adapt to the proper message and media mix is becoming an expectation of today’s healthcare marketing leaders.

Managing Hospital Rankings

What Marketing Leaders Need to Know

© 2014 Gelb Consulting. All Rights Reserved. Page 5

Summary

In summary, rankings might just be the bane of marketers’ existence as you have very little control over such and your executives continue to place pressure to influence and promote them. However, something to reinforce is that service and clinical quality rather than rankings should lead reputation building; and marketing’s roles is to promote such. If marketing is put into a position to affect change, take that opportunity to champion the changes required to ensure that patient care is delivered in such a way that word-of-mouth takes care of any reputational challenges.

Checklist o Become conversant in the methodologies o Embrace the rankings as they may influence decision making, but understand their true

impact through decision factors research o Understand the true drivers of the strategic importance of rankings to executive

(stakeholder analysis) o Explain methods and marketing’s limitation in influencing such, to executives o Become the champion to link rankings to quality and experience management initiatives

(read more) o Review audience conversations with routine brand tracking surveys and social media

monitoring tools (read more) o Amplify your social media presence (read more) o Be prepared to respond to real-time feedback (read more) o Link marketing efforts to demonstrated ROI (Insights 360) For more information about how we help healthcare organizations evolve their experience to achieve real business visit our website at www.endeavormgmt.com/healthcare.

Managing Hospital Rankings

What Marketing Leaders Need to Know

© 2014 Gelb Consulting. All Rights Reserved. Page 6

About Endeavor Management

Endeavor Management, is an international management consulting firm that collaboratively works with their clients to achieve greater value from their transformational business initiatives. Endeavor serves as a catalyst by providing pragmatic methodologies and industry expertise in Transformational Strategies, Operational Excellence, Organizational Effectiveness, and Transformational Leadership. Our clients include those responsible for:

Business Strategy Marketing and Brand Strategy Cultural Transformation Operations Technology Deployment

The firm’s 40 year heritage has produced a substantial portfolio of proven methodologies, deep operational insight and broad industry experience. This experience enables our team to quickly understand the dynamics of client companies and markets. Endeavor’s clients span the globe and are typically leaders in their industry. Gelb Consulting, a wholly owned subsidiary, monitors organizational performance and designs winning marketing strategies. Gelb helps organizations focus their marketing initiatives by fully understanding customer needs through proven strategic frameworks to guide marketing strategies, build trusted brands, deliver exceptional experiences and launch new products.